Mystery shopping and its importance for
stores

by Joseph Then

Mystery shopping, also known as secret shopping, is the method by which a
store or a company evaluates its employees' performance. In this a person in
disguise pretends to be a shopper, visits the store, interacts with the
employees and assesses their ability to build a rapport with the customer in
order to sell their products. That person is actually hired by the store owner
or the company proprietor to, assess the performance of employees and in the end
submit the report to the proprietor. The person hired is called mystery shopper.

Apart from evaluation of performances, mystery shoppers analyze other
commercial aspects of retail stores. These aspects could be price, availability,
and quality of the product; customer service via websites, telephones and in
person; and house keeping. The freelance professionals called secret shoppers
then hand over their assessment to the company head who actually hired them.

There are no essential requirements to be a secret shopper, as shoppers don't
have specific appearance or qualification. Those who have a flair and passion to
enhance the customer service and the quality of the product can plunge into
secret shopping. It would be interesting to learn that the secret shoppers are
paid for their job. It is a profession just like any other profession.

Although the job entails shopping which is fun, mystery shopping is a serious
business and should be carefully dealt with. There must be certain innate traits
within a person that would be helpful in being a secret shopper. These traits
are the ability to act or pretend, being trustworthy, reliable and professional.
Apart from all these, secret shoppers should have a better mode of
transportation, good writing skills and a clear perspective of actual reporting
and their personal opinion so that the truth is not tampered.

The stores make use of mystery shopping to uplift their sales by improving
customer satisfaction. Secret shoppers are hired wholely and solely to increase
sales by improving the performance of the employees. Mystery shopping is useful
not just for evaluating the staff's performance but also for checking the
customer service offered by the rival business. It can be compared with one's
own customer service to find the problem areas. The problems can then be
rectified to increase the number of customers and hence the sales.

Before hiring a mystery shopper make sure to inquire about the services that
the shopper has in hand, do the research well before hiring. Conducting an audit
of the employees is a tough job as it is mandatory that they do not get prior
information regarding this exercise otherwise they will not present their true
picture at the time of scrutiny.

A store manager keeps a vigil on his employees while they deal with the
customers in person and over the phone. This often makes the employees nervous
and they become inadvertent under pressure. Instead a mystery shopper brings out
the true picture of the employees as they perform naturally. This helps to
locate the fault and the drawbacks of each and every employee perfectly which
subsequently helps in improving customer satisfaction. Sometimes the customers
inquire about the products over the phone before coming to the store. In this
situation, the employee's ability to converse with them over the phone, in order
to convert the caller into a potential customer, matters the most. To locate the
faults of the employee, some fake calls are required, and only a professional
mystery shopper can do it. A store can avail the same kind of services provided
by the companies for the product distribution and marketing. Mystery shoppers
are hired by the companies to find out what the customers think about the new
product that hits the market.

Mystery shoppers are known by many names like virtual customers, evaluators
in disguise and spotters but they solve only one purpose of enhancing the
customer service of a store and increasing its sales.

About the Author: Joseph operates an online resource
providing mystery shoppers an avenue to locate more companies to hire them for
mystery shopping tasks. You can read more about the resource at:
http://www.mysteryshopperresource.com, the place for Mystery Shopper
Resource